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8 Reasons Why You Need an Expert to Install Your Metal Roof (Part 2)

Date Published:

December 15th, 2017

When you live in Florida, installing any kind of roof is no picnic. However, while the average beginner with handyman skills could probably figure out how to do their own asphalt shingle roof, installing a metal roof is a whole different ball game. In the last blog from our roofing company in Melbourne, we talked about the first four reasons why we’d recommend leaving this one to the roofing professionals. Today, we’ll cover four more of these reasons.

5. You’ll have to navigate all the valleys, peaks, gables, and funny shapes on your roof.

It would be one thing if roofs were just boring, flat sheets, one on the front, and one on the back, but most roofs aren’t like that. (And anyway, where would be the architectural interest in that?) Each time you reach one of the valleys or peaks on your roof, it will involve extra cutting and measuring, and it takes an experienced eye to do it correctly without wasting any material. One of the things that will make a difference in the overall appeal of the finished roof is if you match up the lines that the ribs make so that the vertical lines on corresponding edges match up with each other. Any dressmaker who has ever worked with striped fabrics will tell you that this is easier said than done. It requires a very careful eye for detail and a high amount of skill and workmanship.

6. You put your own safety at risk.

Depending on the pitch of your roof, you may be running more or less risk to yourself, but even if your roof was flat, you’re working high up, moving around, lifting, and moving large pieces of equipment. One wrong step could mean a fall, and a fall could mean a life-altering injury. This is compounded even more if your roof has an extremely steep pitch. If you’re not trained in how to use the proper safety harness and fall protection equipment, you might not protect yourself as much as you think. And if you don’t even own proper fall protection equipment, you should factor that in to the overall cost of doing the job yourself and see if that changes the outcome of whether you’re saving enough money to make it worth it.

Falls aren’t the only type of injuries you have to be concerned about in roofing. Someone (you?) could run a nail through their hand or foot, drop a heavy piece of equipment onto their toe, injure their back lifting heavy objects, or get heat stroke. You could also cut yourself on the edge of the metal roofing panels, as they can be sharp. Roofing is one of the jobs that comes with the highest number of safety issues, and you don’t want to be a casualty of that.

7. Any damage will go onto your insurance rather than the roofing company’s insurance.

Roofing companies carry great insurance, because they work in a dangerous business. Not only does their insurance cover any damage to personal property, it also covers any potential injury to workers on the job. If you ask a friend, neighbor, or relative to help you on the roof, and they get hurt, can you afford to put that on your own insurance? Would you even be covered for that? Think very carefully about whether you want your insurance premiums to jump (and whether you possess adequate coverage) for the following items:

Injury to yourself

Injury to anyone who helps you out

Damage to your roof (e.g. water damage from your tarp blowing off in that extra-hard rainstorm while the job is only half done)

Damage or theft of the roofing materials

Damage to your property (e.g. something falls off the roof and breaks something on the ground)

8. You won’t get a guarantee

If you do your roof yourself, the only person standing behind the job is you. If your roofer does it, you’ll typically get at least some kind of guarantee on workmanship, materials, or both. Considering that Hippo Roof offers one of the best guarantees in the industry, this is reason enough for you to let us do the work. We offer a transferable lifetime guarantee on both materials and labor on the roofs that we install. That’s how confident we are that your roof will last a lifetime. Don’t pass that up for a few bucks of saving money on labor. You’ll probably get it all back when you never have to be the one to perform any of the inspections or repairs for the life of the roof.

Ask our roofing company for a quote today

It’s absolutely free to get an estimate for your metal roofing job. Hippo Roof is the local area expert in installing metal roofs, and we will be happy to answer your questions and let you pick out the options you want. Contact us today to get started.